


Seasoned with Salt

by Niki



Category: Salt (2010)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Introspection, Spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-02
Updated: 2012-12-02
Packaged: 2017-11-20 02:50:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/580467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niki/pseuds/Niki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life</i>, Sea Fever  by John Masefield, from Salt-Water Ballads</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seasoned with Salt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vyola](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vyola/gifts).



No one can live a lie for years, decades.

So she makes it a truth. _Evelyn Salt_ is her only reality, the truth, the distant reality of Russia and Orlov is buried deep, deeper, and days, weeks go by when she doesn't even think about it. 

She is Evelyn. She is an American. She wants to grow up to serve her country. 

So she does.

\- - -

Mike is another lie she makes a reality. She is praised for her undercover work because she owns her cover stories so completely. 

She is a young woman, falling in love with a man she just met. A man whose profession, reputation and physical location are completely unimportant in relation to her feelings.

It does not stop her from doing her job, and doing it well. It's just that her reality of the day is different to her reality in the night.

When she is captured, she doesn't miss him because she does not think about him, doesn't let herself think about him. She thinks of what she has been taught, and if the strengths she draws on are the teachings of the man she doesn't let herself remember, the end results don't change. 

If she ever thinks about letting her country down, failing her mission, does even she know which country, which mission that is?

\- - -

When she sees Mike after her release, the memory and feeling rush back, and for a second, she is not Evelyn Salt, the spy, she really isn't comrade Chenkov, a KA-12 sleeper agent – she is a young woman, who has fallen in love with a man whose profession, reputation and physical location are completely unimportant in relation to her feelings. 

Is it the rush of thankfulness, the unexpected joy of survival that confuses her feelings?

Or did one of her lies become a truth when she wasn't looking?

She marries him.

\- - -

She loves their apartment. Their very different personalities and interests mesh together to make a warm space she hesitantly calls 'home'. 

She doesn't remember ever having – or wanting – one. 

Home is a room full of spiders. Home is a dog. Home is a fridge with leftovers of home-cooked meals. Home is their clothes co-existing in the closet, their tooth brushes residing side by side, a bed she actually enjoys spending time in, that is not just a place she sleeps her seven point half hours every night. Home is neighbours she knows by name.

Home is a man who gets lost in his studies for hours but whose eyes shine when he sees her. Home is a man who forgave all her lies and loved her through all her self doubts. Home is a man who saved her in more ways than even he knows.

The woman who is called Evelyn knows love, and finally has a space where she doesn't need to lie to herself, where she can just be, and be a person instead of a tool.

She has lived in the States for so long that Russia feels distant. Her allegiance is untested, and she is content to leave it so. If she doesn't need to choose between being Evelyn and Comrade Chenkov, between the two countries, she doesn't need to choose between Mike and the job.

\- - -

Orlov forces her hand. 

The second she sees him she knows the time has finally come. 

The test of her loyalty. 

Orlov tells her later he “had to be certain.” 

He shouldn't have killed Mike. 

\- - -

She feels no guilt in killing her old mentor, the camaraderie of her old allies feels cold and distant. They call her “sister” but she is a wife, now. They shouldn't have taken Mike. 

Maybe her priorities have shifted. Maybe if she had never known what home feels like she could have fulfilled the role she was raised for. 

Maybe. They'll never know.

She has a country to save. Mike's new home country. 

Evelyn's country. 

They made her Evelyn Salt. They made her a weapon. And she will use every last bit of skill she has been taught by two different countries to end this, to weed out the traitors, to save those she can. 

\- - - - - - - - -

There are many levels of truth, as there are of lies. Evelyn Salt was trained by two different agencies to always have a backup plan, always leave herself a way out. 

Even when her attention was on her job or on her husband, she never stopped planning for every possibility, never stopped preparing. There was always a backbag waiting for the day she had to leave in a hurry.

When she finds herself on the run from everyone, from both of her countries, from all of her old allies, she is not left with nothing. 

She has a network of contacts, she has a string of safe houses, she has dozens of caches of essential resources. 

The name she used to sign into the motel is Carla Bonacci, and the driver's license she used will be gone tomorrow. Her hair will be blue, to match the used and torn punk clothes she got from a charity shop, matching the well-worn ID she will use next. She will use it to get to the next city, hitch-hiking her way outside the web of agencies trying to catch her. 

She has to be able to stop so that she can plan. She needs to plan so that she can gather her resources and fulfil her mission. 

Orlov would be so proud. 

No, he wouldn't, she tells herself, smiling for the first time in days. This is exactly what she was trained for and yet it's nothing like what she was trained to do. Or why she was trained to do it. She will enjoy stomping out the traitors. 

Her eyes track a brown spider on the dull brown wall of her room. _Kukulcania hibernalis_. A small male, easy to mistake for the more poisonous _Loxosceles reclusa_. She may have called them “bugs” to his face but she couldn't live with an arachnologist for two years and not learn. Not with her brain, trained to retain details.

She switches on the TV to see her face in the news. Still. She considers laying low for a while, waiting for the loudest furore to die down. It would give her time to plan, too. 

But it would give her time to think. 

For a second she allows herself to miss her home. It would be nice to have a safe place to return to, but the walls would offer no comfort now when the man who warmed them is gone. 

She doesn't give herself a permission to think about him, to miss him, but that is the problem with real emotions – they seep through regardless. 

She wants to blame the spider but is too well trained to do so. Her thoughts and emotions have always been under control – the control she has spent her life – literally – practising. Only Mike has ever broken through that control.

It's impossible to see a spider and not think about her husband. She has never feared them. There is no room for illogical fears in her world. She can't even remember being afraid of any of the usual things as a child – darkness, bugs, thunder, heights... they were all trained out of them even before they recognised their existence. Loneliness has never frightened her, nor does being alone worry her now.

For all her lies she never lies to herself, and at least she knows she will never betray her cause. She will not turn out to be something she isn't... but is that true anymore? She had lived her lie for so long it had become a truth, and she had – on purpose – never thought of what her decision would be if she was activated. 

Did she surprise herself with her decision? No. It had been made – unacknowledged – a long ago. The woman who married Mike had not done so as a part of a cover, not to appear normal. That one act of... humanity shaped her into whatever she is now.

She extends her arm and rests her hand against the wallpaper. Unhesitatingly, the spider walks over her fingers.

Spiders are also weapons. Predators. Their poison she has used for her own gain, now she will use the web. She will weave threads and lines all through the country: some as tripwire, some to catch the prey, some to hide in. She will be the spider in the centre of her web and wait for all the good little flies to come to her. Or the smaller spiders, as the case may be.

She abandons the metaphor and the spider, and gets up from the bed. Enough reflection, time to work. Short term, she needs to dye her hair and rest; long term, she needs clothes and weapons, needs to retrieve more funds, needs to assess her resources. Maybe tap her network to see who is still there. They don't know her by name, most not even by look, still, it's hard to know who to trust anymore. She didn't see Ted coming. And even Peabody is a tenuous contact at best.

No matter. 

There is one other relevant fact about spiders. Most species hunt alone.


End file.
